Life changing broadcast

CHICAGO — Legendary broadcast journalist Bill Kurtis was taking questions from the audience after a mid-September taping of the National Public Radio quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” at Chase Auditiorium in downtown Chicago. Kurtis is the show’s official judge and scorekeeper.

Hands flew up, and a woman a few rows from the stage piped up, not with a question but a declaration.

“I’ll take you back in time: ‘For God’s sake, take cover,’” said Phyllis West, a Topekan who traveled to Chicago, in part, to see the taping of the radio show.

“For God’s sake, take cover” — a 50-year-old reminder of the moment Kurtis warned Topekans to find shelter against a killer tornado heading their way, the moment that shifted the trajectory of his career and life.

On June 8, 1966, a 26-year-old Kurtis found the right voice — authoritative and trusted — that would mold a decades-long career as a news anchor, investigative journalist, narrator and producer; shape his conservation and humanitarian endeavors; and result in cameos in movies and on a hip-hop album.

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

‘Talent in broadcasting’

Kurtis, who was born in Pensacola, Fla., launched his career in broadcasting on his 16th birthday, when he landed his first job at KIND, the sole radio station in Independence, Kan., the town where he grew up. He later wrote, “I waited that first week for a network talent scout to come and pluck me from oblivion.”

The phone never rang, so the teenager went about learning how to be a disc jockey, announcer, newsman, play-by-play sportscaster and studio engineer.

“I could see I had talent in broadcasting. I had a nice voice, and I had no giant scars on my face,” he said.

After high school, Kurtis headed to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he studied journalism while working first at KTOP-AM and then WIBW-TV, both in Topeka.

“I picked up a sack lunch and drove to KTOP to be a top-40 disc jockey under the name Tony Kurtis. I lasted six months,” he said, explaining he grew tired of playing the same songs in the same pattern at the same time every day.

He quit the radio job his sophomore year and turned to television, continuing at WIBW until his graduation from KU in 1962 and his enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, where he served for four years with the 101st Rifle Company in Topeka.

“It was the only time I was not on the airwaves,” he said.

After he left the service, Kurtis returned entered Washburn University’s law school and worked part time at WIBW as an announcer and weatherman. As a law student, he relished researching in the university’s law library for a legal nugget that he could apply in court. He also liked presenting arguments in student competitions. At a competition at Washington University in St. Louis, Kurtis performed before Harry Blackmun, who later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

“Blackmun told me, ‘You’ve got a good delivery because you can make an argument sound interesting. … Good luck,’” Kurtis said.

By spring 1966, contingent on his passing the bar exam, Kurtis had accepted a job with a personal injury law firm in Wichita led by John Frank and Pat Kelly. But he still wasn’t certain he should abandon broadcasting. That decision was made for him when the powerful tornado decided to touch down on the southwest edge of Topeka and plow across the city.

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

‘The world changed’

Kurtis lived with his wife, Helen, and 6-month-old daughter, Mary Kristin, in the married student housing at the southeast corner of Washburn University. He was studying for the state bar examination when WIBW news director Tom Parmley asked him to fill in for him during the 6 p.m. newscast on June 8, 1966, so Parmley could get an early start on his vacation.

The weather was worsening, and a cold front with strong winds was moving toward Topeka from the west. Shortly after 7 p.m., Kurtis cut into a commercial break during “Lost in Space” with a bulletin that 60 mph winds had damaged structures near Manhattan.

“As I remember it, we were interrupted by a two-way radio report by (cameraman Ed) Rutherford on Burnett’s Mound. Rutherford said a tornado was on the south side of the mound,” he recalled.

Kurtis said he gave a “muted announcement” about the funnel, thinking it would return to the sky, then ad-libbed on air until he was handed another bulletin saying the Huntington Apartment complex at S.W. 29th and Gage had been hit by the tornado.

“And all of a sudden, the world changed, and my world changed forever,” he said. “In a flash of a second, I realized, ‘My God, what I report on the air can be life or death to people.’”

Kurtis was trying to decide what to do to get the attention of viewers so they would understand the severity of the storm. He wanted to get them off their couches and into basements without inciting panic.

“I had about three choices: One, to cry. Two, to cuss — you got to break the normal. Or three, to well up, shout and go crazy. I didn’t want to do that; that’s not me. But I could feel myself welling up with pressure … I knew people were relying on me. I knew what I had to do. So, I said, ‘For God’s sake, take cover.’”

Kurtis thought about his family as the twister cut a half-mile-wide path through Washburn University, downtown Topeka and Oakland. And his fears mounted when E. Newton Vickers, a Shawnee County District Court judge, came into the TV station and said, “Washburn’s gone.”

“I told them I would call if it was anything bad, but I was on the air,” he said, adding he later learned his wife and daughter had sought shelter in the basement of Stoffer Science Hall on the Washburn campus and weren’t injured.

Kurtis and the rest of the WIBW crew worked nonstop the next 24 hours, simulcasting on WIBW radio. They disseminated the most accurate information they could about the storm and its damage and reported the names of victims and survivors so loved ones who couldn’t get through on jammed or damaged telephone lines would know their fate.

“We were news people,” he said. “We knew that out there, beyond the studio, people were hurting and scared, so we do what we can.”

Kurtis went on to pass the bar exam, but the tornado had changed the direction of his career. He notified the Wichita law firm that he was going into broadcasting, and within three months, WBBM-TV in Chicago had added him to its reporting team.

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

Storied career

A half-century later, Kurtis is “the voice” of Chicago — a celebrity who can’t walk along Michigan Avenue without passers-by excitedly whispering, “That’s Bill Kurtis!” or reaching out for a handshake to express their admiration.

It was on their streets, after all, where Kurtis polished his journalism skills – analyzing words to determine whether they were precise or opinionated, learning from seasoned colleagues and realizing images and sound often are more powerful than good writing.

He covered the violent clashes between police officers and protestors during the August 1968 Democratic National Convention and neighborhood fires after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. He produced a documentary on accused propagandist Iva Toguri, aka Tokyo Rose, which helped persuade President Gerald Ford to pardon her in 1977, the same year Kurtis’ wife, Helen, died of breast cancer.

Kurtis was hired in 1969 by CBS in Los Angeles, where his Washburn law degree came in handy as he covered the murder trials of cult leader Charles Manson, political activist Angela Davis and serial killer Juan Corona and the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who released the top-secret Pentagon Papers.

“Names that are lost in history perhaps, but they were certainly big at the time,” he said.

Four years later, Kurtis returned to WBBM-TV as co-anchor. He honed his investigative chops with reports on the exposure of American troops to Agent Orange in Vietnam; Amerasian children abandoned by American soldiers after the Vietnam War; the killing of civilians in El Salvador; and the poaching trade in Africa, as well as other international news stories.

In 1982, Kurtis joined television journalist Diane Sawyer on “CBS Morning News” in New York City. Three years later, he returned to WBBM-TV, and in 1988 Kurtis Productions, which has produced almost 500 series, including “Investigative Reports,” “Cold Case Files,” “American Justice” and “American Greed.”

Among his other credits are the PBS series “The Miracle Planet” and “Return to Chernobyl,” with Kurtis being the first American television reporter to enter the nuclear disaster site, and “The New Explorers” series for the A&E network. He has written three books — “On Assignment,” “Death Penalty on Trial” and “Prairie Table Cookbook.”

Plus, he has found a place in popular culture, narrating the “Anchorman” movies starring popular “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Will Ferrell and being sampled in hip-hop artist Dr. Dre’s 2015 album, “Compton.” He’s also the host of a daily hourlong documentary for Decades, a new digital channel, that relives history through reports from the CBS archives.

But it isn’t his broadcast achievements alone that endear Kurtis to Chicagoans. He has spent endless hours trying to make the city better. He is a lifetime trustee of the Chicago Zoological Society, former board trustee of the National Park Foundation and currently on the board of directors at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Strong City, Kan., the Nature Conservancy, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation and the Field Museum of Natural History, where former KU executive vice chancellor and provost Richard Lariviere now serves as president and CEO.

“(Bill’s) incredibly important to the museum,” Lariviere said. “His voice is familiar to everyone, but his intellectual and moral voice is also important to the museum. He’s big-hearted, generous and everyone respects him. … He’s just one of those guys who has great ideas all the time.”

Last year, Kurtis provided the narration for the U-505 submarine exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. He and his wife, Donna LaPietra, were among the founders of Millennium Park, where their names are carved in a large stone wall on Wrigley Square. Kurtis also has restored the land to its native state on his 65-acre home in Mettawa, Ill., where he maintains beehives.

And yet, while he loves Chicago, Kansas is never far from Kurtis’ mind. He owns a ranch near Sedan that raises grass-fed beef and is managed by his now-grown daughter, Mary Kristin. He and his sister, former state Sen. Jean Schodorf, own and developed the Little House on the Prairie Museum on their family farm near Independence.

The license tag on his Lexus SUV reads “TALLGRS,” and on his desk at Kurtis Productions sits a nameplate engraved with “For God’s sake, take cover.”

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

Bill Kurtis

Emotion lingers

Back at the “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” taping in Chase Auditorium, Phyllis West, the Topekan, was telling Kurtis how she squeezed into a crawl space under a house to avoid the wrath of the June 1966 twister. Suddenly, a man’s voice could be heard from the other side of the auditorium.

“I was there, too,” he shouted.

Bob Schuette, a software developer now living in Marian, Ohio, was a 15-year-old helping his brother, Dale, install a stairway in a house between the 600 and 900 blocks of S.W. College Avenue when the tornado hit. Unharmed, he joined other Boy Scouts the next day to help clean up the damage.

After the Q&A session, Schuette and West exchanged stories about the tornado with Kurtis.

“I spent one day pulling books out of the law library at Washburn (University),” Schuette said, describing how he also helped an attorney salvage materials from a house near Burnett’s Mound.

Another man, Michael Vaughn, of Frederick, Md., approached the trio. He, too, had a connection to the Topeka tornado. His father was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, and he and his brother were among students who volunteered to help with disaster relief after the capital city’s twister.

Vaughn marveled that out of the 200 to 300 people at the taping, at least four people — who didn’t know each other — had shared a half-century-old experience.

“It’s just funny with all of us at the same place and the same time,” he said.

Kurtis understands the emotional hold the Topeka tornado continues to have on those who lived through it.

Several years after the tornado, he was speaking on a 90-degree day at a rededication of the Pioneer Women memorial at Council Grove. The sun was beating down on several hundred people sitting in the bleachers.

After his speech, he went over to the spectators, told them he was sorry they had to sit in the sun and asked why they were there.

Kurtis pauses. Tears well up in his eyes.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said apologetically. “They said, ‘Well, we came because we were watching (WIBW) that day.'”

His voice catches.

“And it’s that emotion that comes up. It’s not sentimentality or nostalgia; it’s the very emotion that I felt at that time, and it comes back when I think about the moment and when I talk about it because it meant life and death to these people.